More SSD suggestions
Some more thoughts on SSDs you may wish to take on board.
To maximise the life of your drive you need to minimise the amount of deletes that go on, try to set up your PC so that you don't have too much data changes going on. Easy targets are Hiberfil.sys and Pagefile.sys.
Hiberfil.sys is basically a replica of what is in your RAM when you go in to hibernation mode. Now I’m not sure about you but I never use this. Under XP this was a simple turn of under Power Configuration in control panel. On Windows 7 you need to get a cmd box up with Admin rights (right click Command Prompt and select Run as Admin) and type powercfg -H OFF, hit enter and your Hiberfil.sys will disappear never to be seen again.
Moving the Pagefile is little more involved. You can remove completely if you wish but don’t shout at me when Windows falls over or glitches. Not having a page file will cause problems and not having a page file of the right size in the right place can also cause problems. If you don’t have another drive to move it to give up now, that’s all you Laptop users for a start. If you do then it might be worth defragging the drive you’re planning put the pagefile on to before you move it there as Windows generally tries to create a file in free space rather than fragmenting it if possible to aid performance.
Firstly to access the page file settings on Windows 7 in you need to go in to Computer > Properties and select Advanced System Settings, on XP just right click My Computer and select Properties. On the Advanced Tab select the Performance Settings button. Then the advanced tab and in the Virtual Memory section click the Change button.
If you have the Automatically Manage paging file size for all drives box ticked, untick it now.
The general rule of thumb is that the page file should be 1.5 times the size of RAM. I have 4GB so my page file should be 6GB or 6142MB (1024 x 6).
To remove the page file on the C: drive you need to select that drive a then click on the “No paging file” radio button, then click on the Set button. You more than likely get some error message about Windows not being able to create or store debugging info, well you really don’t have to worry too much about this as the only ones who are likely to want this are Microsoft and have you ever rung them up and supplied a crash dump to them? No neither have I and I look after 1000 PCs and 150 servers. Though to be fair Sophos did want one from one of our servers once but the pagefile was on its own drive and was 25GB in size. Windows won’t create a full crash dump if the pagefile is on a drive other than the Windows drive, so you would need to have 25GB free for the pagefile and 25GB free for the crash dump, the server in question only had a 36GB system drive, so it never happened.
Getting back to the job in hand, next select another drive with sufficient free space. You can now either set the page file to the recommended size (1.5 x RAM) or you can let Windows manage it. I prefer to create a file of the right size from the start or you could end up with a badly fragmented page file.
In my case this moved 10GB of data off the SSD that didn’t need to be there, (my SSD is only 60 GB formatted so 1/6th of the drive capacity), if only there was some way to of load the Temp folder from my profile, or better still the whole of my profile.....
To maximise the life of your drive you need to minimise the amount of deletes that go on, try to set up your PC so that you don't have too much data changes going on. Easy targets are Hiberfil.sys and Pagefile.sys.
Hiberfil.sys is basically a replica of what is in your RAM when you go in to hibernation mode. Now I’m not sure about you but I never use this. Under XP this was a simple turn of under Power Configuration in control panel. On Windows 7 you need to get a cmd box up with Admin rights (right click Command Prompt and select Run as Admin) and type powercfg -H OFF, hit enter and your Hiberfil.sys will disappear never to be seen again.
Moving the Pagefile is little more involved. You can remove completely if you wish but don’t shout at me when Windows falls over or glitches. Not having a page file will cause problems and not having a page file of the right size in the right place can also cause problems. If you don’t have another drive to move it to give up now, that’s all you Laptop users for a start. If you do then it might be worth defragging the drive you’re planning put the pagefile on to before you move it there as Windows generally tries to create a file in free space rather than fragmenting it if possible to aid performance.
Firstly to access the page file settings on Windows 7 in you need to go in to Computer > Properties and select Advanced System Settings, on XP just right click My Computer and select Properties. On the Advanced Tab select the Performance Settings button. Then the advanced tab and in the Virtual Memory section click the Change button.
If you have the Automatically Manage paging file size for all drives box ticked, untick it now.
The general rule of thumb is that the page file should be 1.5 times the size of RAM. I have 4GB so my page file should be 6GB or 6142MB (1024 x 6).
To remove the page file on the C: drive you need to select that drive a then click on the “No paging file” radio button, then click on the Set button. You more than likely get some error message about Windows not being able to create or store debugging info, well you really don’t have to worry too much about this as the only ones who are likely to want this are Microsoft and have you ever rung them up and supplied a crash dump to them? No neither have I and I look after 1000 PCs and 150 servers. Though to be fair Sophos did want one from one of our servers once but the pagefile was on its own drive and was 25GB in size. Windows won’t create a full crash dump if the pagefile is on a drive other than the Windows drive, so you would need to have 25GB free for the pagefile and 25GB free for the crash dump, the server in question only had a 36GB system drive, so it never happened.
Getting back to the job in hand, next select another drive with sufficient free space. You can now either set the page file to the recommended size (1.5 x RAM) or you can let Windows manage it. I prefer to create a file of the right size from the start or you could end up with a badly fragmented page file.
In my case this moved 10GB of data off the SSD that didn’t need to be there, (my SSD is only 60 GB formatted so 1/6th of the drive capacity), if only there was some way to of load the Temp folder from my profile, or better still the whole of my profile.....
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